THE SCHIZOPHRENIC IMPACT ON THE CEREBELLAR NETWORK: A NEURAL MODELLING STUDY

The aim of this thesis is to discover how the cerebellum impairment brought by the schizophrenic disease influences the cell responses of the cerebellar cortex. With the aid of computational neural modelling we simulated the cerebellar behaviour in both healthy and schizophrenic conditions with different impairment extents, to investigate any correlation between the changes in the cells’ responses and the impairment levels. Based on literature, the impairment was implemented as a reduction of Purkinje Cells’ dendritic tree, this was translated into a decreased number of synapses impinging on the Purkinje Cells’ dendrites. Our results found a main significant correlation between the level of impairment and the modulation capability of Purkinje Cells in responding to network stimuli, in terms of firing rate and response pattern. In the first chapter we will introduce the schizophrenia disease, the cerebellum and neural impairment brought by the disease. In this context, we will also introduce the scientific field of the computational neural modelling. In the second chapter we will explain the methods; how we created and simulated our models of healthy and impaired schizophrenic cerebellum circuits, using a Brain Scaffold Builder codebase and ad-hoc python libraries, customized on cerebellar structure and function. In the third chapter we will report and analyse the results. In the fourth chapter we will discuss and summarize the results and talk about future perspective and limits of our study.